Let’s kick off the week with another look at Bullet, the junkie con of James B. Harris‘ prison drama Fast-Walking (1982). Here he expresses his displeasure with Wasco’s (Tim McIntire) money-making scheme.
As we all know, Harris is the man who fired Timothy from Paths of Glory (1957). As Harris recently recounted in an interview with Film Comment, “I got a call at six in the morning from the Munich police, saying Tim had been found abandoned on the highway, bound hand and foot, claiming he’d been kidnapped. They thought production was responsible, looking for publicity, that it was a staged act. I said I knew nothing about it, but we needed him to work—they were holding him down at the police station. I told them that Tim was making up this story because he wanted the publicity, not us. So they said they would accommodate us by bringing him to the film studio—they were gonna interview him there. But Tim wouldn’t agree to the statement he was supposed to sign, he kept changing things about it. So I went up to Tim and said: ‘We’re all waiting for you. Sign the paper and get to work.’ And he wouldn’t sign the paper, so I fired him right there.”